I’m sorry to say something that may cause an international incident. But the Portuguese cook as if my Yorkshire foremothers had moved to southern Europe. Portuguese produce is excellent: fresh fish, wonderful vegetables, fine meat. But restaurants mostly just plonk a sea bream, a large boiled potato and a steamed vegetable on to your plate. The Italians and Spanish take the same ingredients and magic them into dishes of excitement and grandeur. Puzzlingly, Portugal doesn’t seem to believe in sauces, spices, herbs or flavour. It is what my father would have appreciated as “good plain food”.
The fish can indeed be like that. Just damn good fish on a plate.
The sauces and spicing all over in the meats and stews section, d’ye see?
I spent a week in the Douro a couple of years ago and, based on that experience, there is some truth in the assertion that Portuguese food is plainer than Spanish. It’s a long time since I visited Lisbon, but 20-odd years ago it had some pretty decent restaurants serving Michelin-standard food.
Fish is best with minimal fucking about.
As soon as lotsa spices and marinades are introduced to fish, the first question anyone should ask is: What. Are. You. Hiding?
Yep.
A popular food here in southeastern US is barbecue. Smoked pork with heavy spices. Known to have been invented as a way to use unpalatable pork.
See also: curry
In Jamie Oliver goes to Italy or some such. He set up a grilled fish stall in a scicillian piazza. All local competition grilled the fish with salt, lemon and olive oil. Jamie added all sorts of herbs and spices. The scillians who did try jamie’s version when asked were baffled why he did all that to a lovely piece of fish.
See below:
lol from me and Mrs Bloke in North Dorset.
very good.
A long time since I went there, but every meal was delicious.
We surreally sat in a restaurant where the Port version of of Who Wants to be a Millionaire was on and I astounded the clientele by answering a lot of the questions ( in English ).
Oh I can cap that. We did the same once on a ferry from Zeebrugge except that we answered in Flemish. Or at least in a mixture of German and Scots, which was a good approximation thereto.
As for the Portugeezers: a fine people. I approve of fish dishes being simple. That, after all, is the principle of how we eat fish and chips, crab, and so on. Hell, you can even spoil salmon if you are too heavy with the dill. My most recent PT dish was some tinned sardines that I’d been given as a present. Tip top.
Vlaams is a nice language, I found it really easy to pick up when I lived in Brussels.
Forgotten most of it now. like the little Italian I had 🙁
( I mean a little bit of Italian, not a literal little Italian )
But the Portuguese cook as if my Yorkshire foremothers had moved to southern Europe.
What’s Portuguese for
“Wipe tha bloody feet .”
When choosing what to eat in a restaurant my wife always complains about the “extra” things added to the dish. Many things she would otherwise have chosen an enjoyed are ruled out because a palatable meal has been contaminated with chiles or truffle oil.
Master Chef has a lot to answer for.
Ugh! Truffle oil! The most overhyped thing in the chef’s repertoire
As Sam Vimes would say “without any avec”.
Don’t forget we have to the thank the Portuguese for the most traditional British dish – Fish and Chips.
no, not tikka masala.
But yes vindaloo.
When did “magic” become a verb?
After it podiumed and then medalled.
Verbing weirds words
“The Italians and Spanish take the same ingredients and magic them into dishes of excitement and grandeur”
Eh? Italian food is boring.
I’m sure it’s been observed before, but the worse the produce, the more you have to do things with it. People get all twatty about bouillabaisse, but it’s a fisherman’s soup. All the crappy fish that they caught that no-one wanted to buy got turned into soup for lunch with lots of herbs and spices so it doesn’t taste like shit. But a nice lobster, you don’t do much with it.
the worse the produce, the more you have to do things with it. People get all twatty about bouillabaisse, but it’s a fisherman’s soup.
It does amuse me that so many of the “signature” dishes are actually peasant scoff. Like the paella they sell at outrageous prices to tourists here. Paella is rice with anything you’ve got to sling in it to give it some flavour. I’ve actually eaten real paellas with poor people in a sort of shanty town near Valencia. Paella is the name of the pan it’s cooked in. A passing chicken gets its throat cut. If you’re near the coast, the kids go searching rock pools for shellfish, someone rows out & sees what’s in the pots. Inland it’ll be rabbit or any other “found” meat. The guys stand around the paella, stirring, drinking beer, talking about football. The women sit round in circle doing salad & talking about the men. It costs around 25 cents for a large plate full because the only thing bought was the rice.
For fish, I cook moqueca. Bahiano dish. Any fish filleted & layered in a pan with onion & peppers, coconut milk, palm oil, flavoured with cilantro & chili. I reckon I could serve 6 for under 6€. Never seen it in a restaurant but you could probably reckon 25€ plus a serving
Italian food is boring.
What’s Italian food? Italian food is very regional. The Italian restaurant we usually eat at here is. The cuisine doesn’t bear any resemblance to a UK Italian.
Our lesson in Venice was eat the fish. Almost everything else we tried was dire.
I’ve tried various dishes, and I generally consider it not very interesting. But the produce in the country is generally top rate.
Is the cilantro the Spanish word for coriander?
One of them: cilantro / culantro / coriandro.
Yes. But it’s the leaves we use, not the seeds. As a herb not a spice.
Which reminds me. I need to get some seeds. We use so much we really out to be growing it. It doesn’t keep well & I’ve never seen it as dried.
One point might be that, in a lot of recipes, the marinades, herbs and spices are there to cover up other issues.
For instance, an authentic vindaloo begins with the meat or fish spending a good few hours in a bath of vinegar laced with garlic, then it gets cooked in a heavily-spiced sauce. That gives it a good flavour, certainly… but was originally a great way for Portuguese cooks in Goa to get one more meal out of meat that would be otherwise rejected.
(For the same reason, my 1970s “The Food Repair Handbook” – an entertaining compendium of how to cope with various kitchen problems, from a split mayonnaise to misbehaving potatoes – said of cooking meat that was past its best that it should be washed in diluted vinegar, then served with a ‘flavourful sauce’…)
If you’ve got good, fresh food, why mess about with it?
Indeed. Hot countries; Mexico, India, Thailand often have very spicy sauces because fresh meat and fish spoil very quickly there.
We eat a lot of chili con carne, because of the S. Americanas infestation. But that’s pretty anodyne compared with Brits ideas. The food of most of these countries isn’t as spiced as you think it is. The “hot” sauces get served separate, to taste. I’ve a bottle of brasilian chile sauce in the fridge, her highness brought back. It really is nuclear. Only la boliviana will risk it. Most of them don’t like food that fiery, including the mexicans.
A lot of the tropical kitchens *are* about using spicy stuff on fresh food. As a preservative…
I’m most familiar with the indonesian kitchen. *fresh* fish is mostly just grilled, with just some salt after.
If you want to preserve it, you get pepesan ikan ( fresh whole fish rubbed in salt, ground chillies and lemongrass wrapped in palm leaves) or sambal goreng ( a chilly/lemongrass sauce you dump the fillets in as a hot marinade treatment. Also used for chicken, pork, boiled eggs).
Thing with that is that the preservation actually complements the flavour of the fish. If it is already off you *will* still taste it.
And yes, you can cheat with it, but those peeps are Amateurs and uncivilised barbarians.
Just damn good fish on a plate.
That’s what I like about eating in Portugal. Spanish tend douse everything with olive oil. Vile, because fish is far too delicate a flavour. All the taste’s the oil. Portugal you can taste what you’re eating. Like good French cuisine. Good quality materials with minimal cooking. Sauces are to compliment not to obscure.
Classic French cuisine features elaborate sauces, originally used to disguise the inferior quality of the ingredients. But you can get great steak frites in most places, I recently hit a brasserie in Metz (3Y if you’re ever there – Tunisian), where they served Prizius beef – the French attempt to match Wagyu.
Classic French cuisine features elaborate sauces,
I think that’s describing haute cuisine. Like nouvelle cuisine, it’s a bit passe now. Good French cooking’s gone back to the middle ground, which most people cook anyway. Good quality materials cooked just right, not over cooked & don’t bother about trying to turn a plate into artwork. I wish they’d heard about it here. You’re still likely to get meager amounts of almost raw vegetables surrounded by sauce dribbles. If they don’t serve them á la Espanol, or boiled to death in English.
Curiously, there’s an opinion that haute cuisine is actually English. It goes back the Grande Expositions at the end of the C19th when the French had to do a lot of high end cooking & didn’t have sufficient chefs to meet demand. So a lot of English cooks legged it over to France for the money & assumed French names. And they were the ones responsible for a lot of the over-complicated stuff. It does make a sort of sense. The UK at the time was was far wealthier in depth than France. France was more, mostly poor, with a leavening of rich at the top. No doubt the result of its appetite for getting involved in wars & being a late starter in the Industrial Revolution.
Look at Paris & London architecture. Hausmann is mid C19th. London had done all that in the century around the Regency. Of course the Great Fire helped.
This American wonders who Janice Turner might be that she could cause an international incident.
Next paragraph:
Practicing medicine without a license?
Use of puberty blockers for social reasons is child mutilation. Evil.
I’ve always assumed that the chilli vinegar and white pepper associated with traditional pie, mash and liquor was a throwback to when the pie meat was well past its best. I still love it.
Serious question: what did Asians use to spice up their food before Iberians introduced the chili/chilli to them?
Pepper corns.
Yep. Sichuan food, which is blisteringly hot, must have been radically different with black and sichuan pepper.
I’m not an expert on Eastern cuisine. But I’m told chili is cheap & low end. What you’d get in an English curry house or Chinky. If you eat high end you get the original spices.It’s definitely a different taste. Far more subtle.
Butter/olive oil, salt, lemon. Job done. Except:
White fish: wrap in rehydrated kombu and leave in the fridge overnight. Firms up the flesh, intensifies the flavour but not in a fishy way; enhances the umami. Oily fish like salmon: marinate in white koji. The wife makes her own.
They know a thing or two, the Japs.
Portuguese cuisine as practised in Macau (a Portuguese colony for 400+ years) has much to commend it.